Hello, Sun Worshipers!
What is your shadow side like?
Note: This is the last week to enjoy a free preview of these Sunday experiments posts. Starting next week, everyone will be able to see the poetry comic, but the rest of the email will be for paying members only. Also, today if you’re a paying subscriber, you will want to read to the end. In the P.S., you will find a link to your complimentary digital copy of this month’s Weirdoku zine. Today’s newsletter is big, so your email provider might cut it off. For best results, read this issue on a desktop or in the Substack mobile app.
she thought she was free
stopped-allowing him to breathe
waiting and lurking
This week, I ran a similar experiment to last week. This time, I used a random number generator to select lines from three different haiku, and I spliced them into a single poem. I then paired the new Frankenstein’s Monster of Verse with four random panels from previous comics projects.
The result was a little creepy.
This past week,
asked about Morning Pages in his chat. It got me thinking about my feelings toward that system. While I enjoyed the book, The Artist’s Way, I have never been able to click with morning pages. I tried them faithfully for a year and found that my creative practice was stronger without them, and I was less stressed not having to work them into my day.Someday, I will write in more detail about that experience. I know morning pages work well for many artists. Because of the way I’m wired, they do not work for me.
I do have a practice that I use in their place. I call it Free Play. The first thirty minutes of my work time is devoted to messing around with whatever I want. It can be writing, collage, or some other visual art. The only rule is I cannot spend that time on any productive things—no working on existing projects. If I spend a week on a single thing in Free Play, that thing then gets moved into the project category, and it’s slotted a spot in my production schedule. I have to do this otherwise, Free Play would just become more work time, and I would lose the benefits that come from aimlessly screwing around.
This week, Free Time had me working on this:
I’ve now spent a week on this animated comic strip project and have moved it from Free Play to an active project. The movie is pretty rough. I need to flesh out the story, complete the sound design, narration, and animate the rest of the story. I also need to slow everything way down, especially the captions.
I wanted to design a video where the captions were part of the art and didn’t feel like an add-on. I believe that captions are going to be a core part of every movie experience in the near future. My children watch everything with the captions on, even when the sound is also on, and I find that I now prefer to watch videos and movies that way as well. I never miss any dialogue. However, if captions are here to stay, I want to make them feel more organic to the media, make the captions part of the film’s aesthetic. To me, this is what inclusivity and accessibility are all about.
I think this thing is going to be a one-minute short when it’s done. I have some ideas on how to make more stop-motion videos along these lines and how to incorporate them into what I’m already doing.
This stop-motion/moving comic strip thing came about in part because of experiments I was doing with different formats for my comics. I’ve converted a few poetry comics to a four-panel side-by-side format. These look more like the comic strips people of a certain vintage are used to seeing in newspapers:
dystopian hum
of hybrid automobile
sends scrub jay flying
rustle of green leaves
tweets and trills of hidden birds
hum of passing car
the moonrise signaled
we had killed another day
worthy sacrifice?
leave your desk and chair
a poet’s work is outdoors
ocean, mountain, woods
I always enjoy hearing your thoughts on my experiments. Would you like to see more stop-motion video projects? Do you like the comics in this new format? Let me know!
Cheers,
Jason
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Weirdo Poetry to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.